Crazy Thing Called Love (6 page)

Tara Jean’s mouth fell open and he held up his hand, stopping the barrage of questions he could see coming. “We were like ten years old and I … I ruined it.”

“What did you do?”

“Not your business, Tara. I’m sorry, but it’s not.” It
was Maddy’s business and he knew that she’d kept it a secret, so he would, too.

“So is she just going to ask you questions? Or have you play hockey with kids? What?” Tara asked, looking small—but never frail—in her boyfriend’s big T-shirt. He remembered Maddy like that, the sight of her brown legs under one of his T-shirts the hottest thing he’d ever seen.

“A … a makeover. Teach me how to dress, how to act. That sort of thing. She’s gonna shine me up for Dallas.”

Tara’s eyes narrowed and he knew how it sounded, how the show would be debasing at best.

“You gotta admit, it’s good TV and the Mavericks’ PR folks are going to love it.”

“Billy,” she sighed, her eyes so sad on his behalf, which was sweet, but unnecessary. She had no idea how much he was looking forward to this. To seeing Maddy again.

“Don’t worry about me, Tara,” he said, spreading the last of the primer over the wall. “I can take care of myself, and if Maddy wants to humiliate me, I owe her that.”

Tara Jean nodded and went back to priming her section of the room. In that silent moment he thought about his future and how, when you least expected it, the past came all the way back around.

Dressed up like a second chance.

The photo shoot
for the spring promo was in full swing. Gina had done miraculous work, and when Madelyn looked in the mirror she didn’t even recognize herself. She looked perfect. Airbrushed but breathing.

Which was exactly how you wanted to look when you were going to be on a billboard overlooking the North Central Expressway.

The blue Calvin Klein dress fit like a second skin from her chest down to her knees. Ironically, when she had stepped out of the changing area, Gina had clucked her tongue and told her she was too thin.

“What do you want?” Gina had asked in response to Maddy’s incredulous look. “I’m Italian, part of me just wants to feed you manicotti until I can’t see your hip bones.”

Madelyn had thought about manicotti for a good twenty minutes.

“Less teeth, more eyes,” Jerome, the photographer, said over the Beyoncé song on the sound system.

“Can we kill the wind?” she asked, doing exactly what he’d requested, closing her lips and smiling with her eyes, which were getting dried out from the fan blowing in her face.

“Yeah, let’s try a few that way,” Jerome agreed.

She tilted her head back, shifted her hips forward, crossed her arms, dropped her arms. She smiled. She
looked serious. She laughed, tipping her hair back off her shoulders.

On the table next to the yellow and green screen they were shooting against, her BlackBerry rattled into her bottle of water.

All work stopped. Such was the power of a buzzing BlackBerry.

“Just a second,” she said and Jerome nodded, already reviewing the digital shots they’d taken.

The latest message, from Ruth, bloomed on the screen.

Billy Wilkins meeting tomorrow morning after the show. 11:30
.

Her own Brutus hadn’t even had the decency to stab her in the back in person.

In a sudden panic, she began to sweat and it was so hard to breathe. So hard to pull in air past the anger and hurt that rolled through her.

Oh God
, she thought.
I’m going to be sick
.

Forcing herself to calm down, to close her eyes and open her lungs, she yanked away the negative emotions like they were leeches.

The emotions belonged to the old her, stupid Maddy Baumgarten, the fool. The idiot who’d cared about Billy Wilkins despite his casual cruelty. Who had given him everything, only to be repaid in regret and embarrassment.

You are not that girl
, she reminded herself. She’d shed that persona like a too tight skin. Lost all that irrelevant guilt and concern and worry, just like the twenty extra pounds she’d sweated off since divorcing Billy.

Losing the girl she’d been for twenty years hadn’t been easy, but it had been necessary.

“Jerome?” she said, without looking up. She wasn’t sure she could, her muscles felt frozen. Her entire body chilled to the marrow of her bones. “You get what you need?”

“Actually, I’d like to shoot a few more with the yellow backdrop.”

Good. Great. Work would keep her focused. Work would remind her of who she was and, more importantly, who she wasn’t. Work had pulled her from the black hole her divorce had sent her into, it had given her a new identity that had nothing to do with Billy Wilkins. With that useless girl she’d been.

As she stepped back under the lights, the blue of her dress glowed.

Every morning in this city people woke up needing weather and traffic and morning banter. Women sat down with their coffee, looking for a distraction from their screaming children. The population of Dallas was hungry to learn how to redecorate on a budget, find a pediatrician or make the perfect summer cocktail.

And they looked to Madelyn Cornish for all of that.

The girl outside that hotel room door fourteen years ago didn’t exist anymore.

Thursday morning Madelyn was Patton, leading her morning show troops into battle. Joe the Cameraman’s segment about racing through a local Target trying to get all the stuff for a spring break trip was funny and sweet. Every time the man opened his mouth, the female studio audience audibly sighed.

Bringing him up in front of the cameras had been one of their finer ideas.

Even the snake segment went better than expected. A reptile company was going to be touring local schools next week and
AM Dallas
had brought them in to air their highlights. The owner was so engaging and exciting that Madelyn didn’t have to pretend to be scared, or get pooped on, just to make it interesting.

“Nice show,” Joe said when the lights went cold.

“Thanks, Joe, and thanks for taking one for the team with that shopping segment.”

“I’m not kidding, Madelyn, I’m too old for that shit.” Tough as his words were, he grinned while he said them, his soft white face creasing into likeable wrinkles. “If it weren’t getting me laid—”

She covered her ears with her hands. “No no no no, I can’t hear you, Joe.”

On the run, Madelyn grabbed her post-show water from Ramon. She guzzled it as she headed toward her office. There had been a snake around her neck for the last twenty minutes and she wanted to shower, change, and re-do her makeup. Before meeting with her ex-husband in half an hour.

“Good show,” Ruth said as Madelyn turned the corner from the studio, toward the offices.

Screw you, Ruth
. “Thanks.”

“Meeting in—”

“I know.” She glared over her shoulder as she rounded the filing cabinets and cubicles. “I’ll be there for your meeting.”

Ruth didn’t even have the good grace to appear chagrined. She looked self-righteous, standing there in her three-year-old black wrap dress and boots.

We’ll see
, Madelyn thought, pushing open the door to her office with her butt.
We’ll see who’s self-righteous after this meeting
.

She turned in to her office, slamming the door shut behind her, and for a long and confusing moment her brain sent panicked messages to her body to run.

Dressed in an ill-fitting sport coat and a red golf shirt, Billy stood in the middle of her tiny office, not two feet away from her, taking up too much space and air. Space and air she needed.

Inwardly, she reeled, the earth lost beneath her feet.

Numb, she watched his eyes run down her body, taking
in the purple sweater and the black slacks. Her straight hair.

Obscenely, she was pleased that he wouldn’t see much of the girl he’d married in her appearance. She was a stranger to him. But he—with his broken nose, that terrible scar, and the forward-thrust jaw, daring all comers to take a swing—he was all too familiar.

Wearing her indifference like a suit of armor, she tossed her water bottle onto the chair Ruth usually sat in.

“You can’t be in here.”

“I just wanted a chance to talk with you before the meeting.”

She arched her eyebrow, fighting with super-human strength the desire to bite her thumbnail. “About what?”

“Maddy …” he sighed, as if disappointed that she wouldn’t play along.

That sigh’s effect on her composure was cataclysmic—the world went red. Her heart pounded behind her eyes and she wanted to push him through the wall.

But, instead, because she was better than what he wanted her to be, because she’d worked too hard to succumb to the controlling influence of anger and hurt, because, damn it, he couldn’t do this shit to her anymore, she reached behind her and calmly opened the door.

“I think you should leave. I’ll see you at the meeting.”

He blinked, waiting as if she might change her mind.

You will get nothing more from me
, she thought.
Not one more thing
.

The words echoed in the room, echoed between them as if she’d screamed them.

“I’m doing this show,” he said.

She swallowed the growl lodged in her throat, where it joined—in the pit of her belly, where nothing ever vanished, where every slight and pain and injustice was kept and preserved—the millions of screams she’d swallowed during her short, disastrous marriage.

“That’s your prerogative,” she said, managing to keep the sneer from her voice.

Careful not to touch her, he slipped out the door.

Billy sat in what had to be one of the messiest conference rooms—in the middle of the stupidest goddamned meeting he’d ever been in—waiting for his chance to fight.

Victor sat beside him and Billy took some comfort in the man’s quiet, sharklike demeanor.

The producer, wearing a Darth Vader T-shirt, kept grinning at Billy. He filled every gap in the conversation with questions about the fight at the end of the last game, like every other bloodthirsty hockey fan who met him on the street.

Maddy sat at the head of the table, her hair slicked back in a tight ponytail, surrounded by newspapers and magazines and women without half her shine.

She’d changed her clothes, taken off the pants and put on a blue dress that showed off how thin she was. She smiled at him, polite and removed, as if he were selling something cheap. And unwanted.

But beneath that chill, she was bothered.

She had to be. Right? Not that she’d seemed bothered in her office. But he had been … and he was now. Flop sweat, sticky and rank, ran down his sides in spite of the air-conditioning.

Back when they were married she would have been screaming at him. Throwing plates, coming at him with curled fingernails. She’d be hurling insults, vicious and true.

Somehow, she’d figured out how to curb all that. The ice queen at the top of the table didn’t look like she ever screamed, and she certainly didn’t look like she’d faced off against Kevin Dockrill in the cafeteria of Schelany
High School or destroyed every single CD in Billy’s extensive Bruce Springsteen collection.

No, in fact, the woman sitting there looked kind of stupid. And like she barely gave a shit. She was pretty, sure—but she cultivated a certain emptiness. A cool distance.

For a stark and stomach-spinning moment, she seemed like a stranger.

Incredulous, he glanced at everyone else in the room to see if they bought this act of hers. And it didn’t seem like they found anything strange about that vapid empty smile on her face.

He stared at her, waiting for her to break, to catch his eye. They might have had one of the worst marriages in the history of the world but they’d had years of incredible friendship preceding it.

Finally, while someone droned on about positive PR, she looked at him. Right at him.

What gives?
he asked with the lift of his eyebrows.

And those eyes of hers flashed, her lips went taut.

Fuck you, dick-wad
.

The room was suddenly electric with her fury. Everyone shifted awkwardly, glancing sideways at one another as if to see who’d farted.

Somewhere under that sleek hair and flawless face and anemic body was the woman he remembered. The woman who’d fought with him, fought for him, when no one else in the world would.

And this was his chance to fight for her. A chance to make right what he’d gotten so wrong.

He cracked his knuckles, ready for his opening.

“It’s a series of five spots,” Ruth, one of the producers, said, with a smile that was thin as melting ice. “First an introduction, we’ll talk to some of your teammates and family—”

“My family?” he asked. “Why?”

“To hear stories about you as a kid,” she answered smoothly.

“Really?” He glanced over at Maddy, but she was calmly inspecting her manicure like she had no idea who his family was. Or what they were. Like she hadn’t been friends with his little sister, Denise, the two of them thick as thieves for a chunk of their childhood.

He shrugged, having made peace with where and how he’d grown up years ago. Of course, that peace came a whole lot easier with a thousand miles of distance between him and Pittsburgh.